Brazenly defying the West, he revived Islam's faithful and
authored a new form of religious government. The prescriptions
were often chilling
By MILTON VIORST

To
Westerners, his hooded eyes and severe demeanor, his unkempt
gray beard and his black turban and robes conveyed an avenger's
wrath. The image is the man.

Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, the dour cleric who led an Islamic
revolution in Iran, perceived himself above all as an avenger of
the humiliations that the West had for more than a century
inflicted on the Muslims of the Middle East.

He was among many Muslim autocrats in this century to embrace a
mission designed as a corrective to the West. Kemal Ataturk, the
most daring of them, introduced Turkey, after the fall of the
Ottoman Empire in World War I, to Western-style secularism in
order to toughen his society against Europe's imperial designs.
In the 1950s, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, more intemperately,
initiated a fierce campaign of Arab nationalism aimed at
eradicating the vestiges of Western colonialism from the Arab
world.

Khomeini took a different course. All three, at their apogee,
were rulers of once great empires that had fallen into political
and social disarray. But Ataturk and Nasser were committed to
resurrection by beating the West at its own game of building
strong secular states. Khomeini's strategy was to reject Western
ways, keeping Iran close to its Islamic roots.

Some ask, focusing on this strategy, whether Khomeini was riding
a popular wave in global affairs. In the late 20th century,
Muslims were not alone in organizing to restore religious belief
to government. Christians in America, Jews in Israel, even
Hindus in India were promoting the same end. As a revolutionary,
Khomeini sought to bring down not just the Shah's
Western-oriented state but also the secular Weltanschauung that
stood behind it. Did Khomeini's triumph augur an intellectual
shift of global magnitude?

While historians ponder this question, it is enough to say that
Khomeini presided brilliantly over the overthrow of a wounded
regime. He was merciless and cunning. His well-advertised piety
complemented a prodigious skill in grasping and shaping Iran's
complex politics. Most important, he knew how to exploit the
feelings of nationalist resentment that characterized his time.

Ruhollah Khomeini — his given name means "inspired of God" — was
born to a family of Shi'ite scholars in a village near Tehran in
1902. Shi'ism, a minority sect in Islam, is Iran's official
religion. Like his father, he moved from theological studies to
a career as an Islamic jurist. Throughout his life, he was
acclaimed for the depth of his religious learning.

As a young seminary teacher, Khomeini was no activist. From the
1920s to the 1940s, he watched passively as Reza Shah, a monarch
who took Ataturk as his model, promoted secularization and
narrowed clerical powers. Similarly, Khomeini was detached from
the great crisis of the 1950s in which Reza Shah's son Mohammed
Reza Pahlavi turned to America to save himself from
demonstrators on Tehran's streets who were clamoring for
democratic reform.

Khomeini was then the disciple of Iran's pre-eminent cleric,
Ayatullah Mohammed Boroujerdi, a defender of the tradition of
clerical deference to established power. But in 1962, after
Boroujerdi's death, Khomeini revealed his long-hidden wrath and
acquired a substantial following as a sharp-tongued antagonist
of the Shah's.

Khomeini was clearly at home with populist demagogy. He taunted
the Shah for his ties with Israel, warning that the Jews were
seeking to take over Iran. He denounced as non-Islamic a bill to
grant the vote to women. He called a proposal to permit American
servicemen based in Iran to be tried in U.S. military courts "a
document for Iran's enslavement." In 1964 he was banished by the
Shah to Turkey, then was permitted to relocate in the Shi'ite
holy city of An Najaf in Iraq. But the Shah erred in thinking
Khomeini would be forgotten. In An Najaf, he received Iranians
of every station and sent home tape cassettes of sermons to be
peddled in the bazaars. In exile, Khomeini became the
acknowledged leader of the opposition.

In An Najaf, Khomeini also shaped a revolutionary doctrine.
Shi'ism, historically, demanded of the state only that it keep
itself open to clerical guidance. Though relations between
clergy and state were often tense, they were rarely belligerent.
Khomeini, condemning the Shah's servility to America and his
secularism, deviated from accepted tenets to attack the regime's
legitimacy, calling for a clerical state, which had no Islamic
precedent.

In late 1978 huge street demonstrations calling for the Shah's
abdication ignited the government's implosion. Students, the
middle class, bazaar merchants, workers, the army — the pillars
of society — successively abandoned the regime. The Shah had
nowhere to turn for help but to Washington. Yet the more he did,
the more isolated he became. In January 1979 he fled to the
West. Two weeks later, Khomeini returned home in triumph.

Popularly acclaimed as leader, Khomeini set out to confirm his
authority and lay the groundwork for a clerical state. With
revolutionary fervour riding high, armed vigilante bands and
kangaroo courts made bloody work of the Shah's last partisans.
Khomeini cancelled an experiment with parliamentarism and
ordered an Assembly of Experts to draft an Islamic constitution.
Overriding reservations from the Shi'ite hierarchy, the
delegates designed a state that Khomeini would command and the
clergy would run, enforcing religious law. In November, Khomeini
partisans, with anti-American passions still rising, seized the
U.S. embassy and held 52 hostages.

Over the remaining decade of his life, Khomeini consolidated his
rule. Proving himself as ruthless as the Shah had been, he had
thousands killed while stamping out a rebellion of the secular
left. He stacked the state bureaucracies with faithful clerics
and drenched the schools and the media with his personal
doctrines. After purging the military and security services, he
rebuilt them to ensure their loyalty to the clerical state.

Khomeini also launched a campaign to "export" — the term was his
— the revolution to surrounding Muslim countries. His
provocations of Iraq in 1980 helped start a war that lasted
eight years, at the cost of a million lives, and that ended only
after America intervened to sink several Iranian warships in the
Persian Gulf. Iranians asked whether God had revoked his
blessing of the revolution. Khomeini described the defeat as
"more deadly than taking poison."

To rally his demoralized supporters, he issued the celebrated
fatwa condemning to death the writer Salman Rushdie for heresies
contained in his novel The Satanic Verses. Though born a Muslim,
Rushdie was not a Shi'ite; a British subject, he had no ties to
Iran. The fatwa, an audacious claim of authority over Muslims
everywhere, was the revolution's ultimate export. Khomeini died
a few months later. But the fatwa lived on, a source of
bitterness — as he intended it to be — between Iran and the
West.

Beside the fatwa, what is Khomeini's legacy? The revolution, no
longer at risk, still revels in having repeatedly, with
impunity, defied the American Satan. The Islamic state was proof
to the faithful — as the Soviet Union was to generations of
communists — that the Western system need not be a universal
model.

Yet Khomeini rejected a parallel between his doctrines and the
fundamentalism propounded by other Muslim dissidents. He never
described himself as fundamentalist. He often said that Islam is
not for 14 centuries ago in Arabia but for all time.

Since Khomeini's death, the popular appeal of an Islamic state —
and of fundamentalism — has surely dimmed. Thinkers still debate
and warriors kill, but no country seems prepared to emulate
Iran. Perhaps revolutions happen only under majestic leaders,
and no one like Khomeini has since appeared.

~~~<"((((((><~~~<"((((((><~~~<"((((((><~~~<"((((((><~~~<"((((((><~~~

Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini (1902-1989) was the founder
and supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The only
leader in the Muslim world who combined political and religious
authority as a head of state, he took office in 1979.

Ayatollah Khomeini was born on September 24, 1902, according to
most sources. The title Ayatollah (the Sign of God) reflected
his scholarly religious standing in the Shia Islamic tradition.
His first name, Ruhollah (the Spirit of God), is a common name
in spite of its religious meaning, and his last name is taken
from his birthplace, the town of Khomein, which is about 200
miles south of Tehran, Iran's capital city. His father, Mustapha
Musavi, was the chief cleric of the town where he was murdered
only five months after the birth of Ruhollah. The child was
raised by his mother (Hajar) and aunt (Sahebeh), both of whom
died when Ruhollah was about 15 years old.

A Religious Scholar

Ayatollah Khomeini's life after childhood went through three
distinct phases. The first phase, from 1908 to 1962, was marked
mainly by training, teaching, and writing in the field of
Islamic studies. At the age of six he began to study the Koran,
Islam's holy book, and also elementary Persian. Subsequently he
was taught Islamic jurisprudence by his older brother, Morteza
Pasandideh, who was also an ayatollah in the holy city of Qom in
Iran. He completed his studies in Islamic law, ethics, and
spiritual philosophy under the supervision of Ayatollah Abdul
Karim Haeri-ye Yazdi, first in Arak, a town near Khomein, and
later in Qom, where he also got married and had two sons and
three daughters. His older son, Hajj Mustafa, died (allegedly
killed by the Shah's security agents), but the younger one,
Ahmad, was relatively active in revolutionary politics in
Tehran.

Although during this scholarly phase of his life Khomeini was
not politically active, the nature of his studies, teachings,
and writings revealed that he firmly believed from the beginning
in political activism by clerics. Three factors support this
suggestion. First, his interest in Islamic studies surpassed the
bounds of traditional subjects of Islamic law (Sharia),
jurisprudence (Figh), and principles (Usul) and the like. He was
keenly interested in philosophy and ethics. Second, his teaching
focused often on the overriding relevance of religion to
practical social and political issues of the day. Third, he was
the first Iranian cleric to try to refute the outspoken advocacy
of secularism in the 1940s. His now well-known book, Kashf-e
Assrar (Discovery of Secrets) was a point by point refutation of
Assrar-e Hezar Saleh (Secrets of a Thousand Years), a tract
written by a disciple of Iran's leading anti-clerical historian,
Ahmad Kassravi.

Preparation for Political Leadership

The second phase of Khomeini's life, from 1962 to 1979, was
marked by political activism. During this phase he carried his
lifelong fundamentalist interpretation of Shia Islam to its
logical and practical conclusions. Logically, in the 1970s, as
contrasted with the 1940s, he no longer accepted the idea of a
limited monarchy under the Iranian Constitution of 1906-1907, an
idea that was clearly evidenced by his book Kashf-e Assrar. In
his Islamic Government (Hokumat-e Islami) - which is a
collection of his lectures in Najaf (Iraq) published in 1970 -
he rejected both the Iranian Constitution as an alien import
from Belgium and monarchy in general. He believed that the
government was an un-Islamic and illegitimate institution
usurping the legitimate authority of the supreme religious
leader (Faqih), who should rule as both the spiritual and
temporal guardian of the Muslim community (Umma). Practically,
he launched his crusade against the shah's regime in 1962, which
led to the eruption of a religiopolitical rebellion on June 5,
1963. This date (15th of Khurdad in the Iranian solar calendar)
is regarded by the revolutionary regime as the turning point in
the history of the Islamic movement in Iran. The shah's bloody
suppression of the uprising was followed by the exile of
Khomeini in 1964, first to Iraq until expelled in 1978 and then
to France.

Radicalization of Khomeini's religiopolitical ideas and his
entry into active political opposition in the second phase of
his life reflected a combination of circumstances. First, the
deaths of the leading, although quiescent, Iranian religious
leader, Ayatollah Sayyed Muhammad Burujerdi (1961), and of the
activist cleric Ayatollah Abul Qassem Kashani (1962) left the
arena of leadership open to Khomeini, who had attained a
prominent religious standing by the age of 60. Second, although
ever since the rise of Reza Shah Pahlavi to power in the 1920s
the clerical class had been on the defensive because of his
secular and anticlerical policies and those of his son, Muhammad
(Mohammad) Reza Shah, these policies reached their peak in the
early 1960s. The shah's so-called White Revolution (1963) in
particular was considered by the religious leaders as
detrimental to not only the Shia cultural tradition, but also to
their landed and educational interests. And third, the shah's
granting of diplomatic privileges and immunities to the American
military personnel and their dependents (1964) was viewed as
degrading to the Iranian sense of national independence.

Founding the Islamic Republic of Iran

The third phase of Khomeini's life began with his return to Iran
from exile on February 1, 1979 - Muhammad Reza Shah had been
forced to abdicate two weeks earlier. On February 11
revolutionary forces allied to Khomeini seized power in Iran.
The hallmark of this phase was the emergence of Khomeini as the
founder and the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Throughout this phase, Khomeini was preoccupied with the
fundamental goal of engineering an ideal Islamic society in
Iran. From the perspective of Khomeini and his leading
disciples, the Iranian Revolution went through three major
periods. The first one began with Khomeini's appointment of
Mehdi Bazargan as the head of the "provisional government" on
February 5, 1979, and ended with his fall on November 6, two
days after the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. This,
according to Khomeini, marked the beginning of the second
revolution, which was in his view better than the first one that
had resulted in the departure of the shah (January 16, 1979).
The hallmark of this so-called second revolution was the
elimination of mainly nationalist forces from politics. As early
as August 20, 1979, 22 opposition newspapers were ordered
closed. In terms of foreign policy, the landmarks of the second
revolution were the destruction of U.S.-Iran relations and the
Iranian defense against the Iraqi invasion of the Shatt-al-Arab
(September 22, 1980). The admission of the shah to the United
States on October 22, 1979; Khomeini's instruction to Iranian
students on November 1 to "expand with all their might their
attacks against the United States" in order to force the
extradition of the shah; and the seizure of the American embassy
on November 4 led to 444 days of agonizing dispute between the
United States and Iran until the release of the hostages on
January 21, 1981.

The so-called third revolution began with Khomeini's dismissal
of President Abul Hassan Bani-Sadr on June 22, 1981. In
retrospect, the fate of Bani-Sadr, as that of Bazargan,
reflected Khomeini's singleminded determination to eliminate
from power any individual or group that could stand in the way
of his engineering the ideal Islamic Republic of Iran which he
had formally proclaimed on April 1, 1979, and which he called
"the first day of the Government of God." This government,
however, had yet to be molded thoroughly according to his
fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. In terms of foreign
policy, the main characteristics of the third revolution were
the continuation of the Iraq-Iran war, increasing rapprochement
with the Soviet Union, and expanded efforts to export the
"Islamic revolution."

In the opinion of this author, the revolution began going
through yet a fourth phase in late 1982. Domestically, the
clerical class had consolidated its control, prevented land
distribution, and promoted the role of the private sector in the
economy. Internationally, Iran sought a means of ending its
pariah status and tried to distance itself from terrorist
groups. It expanded commercial relations with Western Europe,
China, Japan, and Turkey; reduced interaction with the Soviet
Union; and claimed that the door was open for reestablishing
relations with the United States. Late in 1985 a special
60-member assembly of religious figures designated as Khomeini's
eventual successor for the office of "Supreme Jurisprudent", a
close ally - Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri (born 1922).

In November of 1986 President Reagan acknowledged that the
United States had secretly supplied some arms to Iran. The
disclosure and subsequent handling of the purchase money led to
a lengthy congressional investigation and the appointment of an
independent counsel to see if federal statutes had been
violated.

In 1988, Khomeini and Iran accepted the United Nation's call for
a cease-fire with Iraq. On February 14, 1989, Khomeini sentenced
writer Salman Rushdie to death, without a trial, in a legal
ruling called a fatwa. Khomeini deemed Rushdie's novel The
Satanic Verses to be blasphemous because of its unflattering
portrait of Islam. Before his death from cancer in Iran on June
3, 1989, Khomeini designated President Ali Khamenei to succeed
him. Khomeini is still a revered figure to Iranians. Each year
on the anniversary of his death, hundreds of thousands of people
attend a ceremony at his shrine at the Behesht-e-Zahra cemetery.